The Enquirer today looks into an issue CityBeatinvestigated back in May of last year —
the ongoing debate weighing the danger police pursuits pose to
innocent bystanders and the police officers themselves. Our story
referenced the March 16, 2011 deaths of a downtown taxi driver and
his passenger when a fleeing suspect broadsided the taxi. In that
case, the Cincinnati Police Department determined that police had
followed the department’s pursuit policy. The Enquirer’s story
suggests that Cincinnati Police routinely fail to follow the pursuit
policy and that crashes and injuries during police chases occur more
here than the national average.

President Obama dropped $90 mil
on a couple of local non-profit development companies. Cincinnati
Center City Development Corp. (3CDC) and the Uptown Consortium were
awarded $50 million and $40 million tax credits, respectively, by the
U.S. Department of the Treasury as part of a program aimed at
spurring retail and residential growth. 3CDC says it plans to create
a rock climbing wall/juice bar/light-free techno dance hall in order
to draw more YPs to the area. (Just kidding.)

P&G plans to cut
5,700 jobs next year (and we just had our resumes all cleaned up to
prove we could write the best stories about how Tide makes clothing —
and life — better for everyone…).

The New York Police
Department is defending its recent practice of spying on mosques
using tactics it normally reserves for criminal organizations. The AP got a hold of documents that showed police "collecting the license plates of worshipers, monitoring
them on surveillance cameras and cataloging sermons through a network of
informants."

The new documents,
prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly, show how the NYPD's
roster of paid informants monitored conversations and sermons inside
mosques. The records offer the first glimpse of what those
informants, known informally as "mosque crawlers," gleaned
from inside the houses of worship.

Seven Marines were
killed in a training crash near the California-Arizona border
Wednesday night, one of the deadliest training crashes ever.
Officials say it will take weeks to determine why the two helicopters
crashed in midair during a routine exercise.

Duke Energy is asking state regulators if it can bump customers' rates up again. Duke says the
increases are to pay for infrastructure investments. The change would
increase customer costs of electric service by $86 million and for
natural gas by $44 million. A federal appeals court on Monday reinstated an antitrust lawsuit against Duke Energy that accuses the
company of paying kick-backs to corporations opposing a 2004 rate
increase.

A rally for “religious freedom”
will take place on Fountain Square today in response to federal health care
legislation requiring women to have abortions employers to
provide insurance that covers birth control. The law includes a
religious exemption, which bishops have said isn't enough.

New York City officials, including
Brooklyn Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke, are arguing that the city's
“Stop and Frisk” policy is racist. The policy allows police to
stop an individual and pat him or her down for contraband if they
suspect illegal activity. From USA Today:

Clarke says the program, known as "Stop, Question and Frisk"
or "Stop and Frisk," amounts to racial profiling. It is
based on a 1968 Supreme Court ruling that police could stop people on
the basis of "reasonable suspicion."

Last month, U.S. District Court Judge Shira Scheindlin approved
class-action status for a lawsuit that alleges the practice subjects
people to race-based illegal searches.

Rick Santorum has formed a new conservative organization aiming to
recruit 1 million supporters to help get Barack Obama out of the
While House. No word on how Santorum's “Patriot Voices” group
will differ from the tea party patriots.

Black members of the Netherlands soccer team were subjected to
racist chants at their Euro 2012 practice facility in Krakow, Poland.
The team says fans were making monkey chants at the players.

LeBron James scored 45 points to lead the
Miami Heat over the Boston Celtics last night, forcing a deciding Game 7 for the
Eastern Conference championship. The Oklahoma Thunder await in the
NBA Finals.

After 18 months in the courts, Democrat
Tracie Hunter has won a Hamilton County Juvenile Court judgeship, but
a GOP challenge to the court's acceptance of Hunter's challenge is
likely to follow. Republican John Williams led hunter by 23 votes on
election night 2010, but Hunter filed a lawsuit over provisional
ballots cast at incorrect polling stations that weren't counted. After a
recount of 286 provisional ballots, Hunter moved ahead by 74 votes.
Republican board of election members reportedly plan to argue that
the 286 should not have been recounted.

The Enquirer's Mark Curnutte today
offered an analysis of recently released census data that shows a
steady growth of the regional Hispanic population and a growth of
minority population in areas outside the city that were once largely
white. Cincinnati's data suggests that the city and region are
slightly different than the nation's overall trend, which in 2011 for
the first time found a majority of the country's under 1-year-old
population minority (50.4 percent), up from 49.5 percent in 2010.

Included in The Enquirer's story, which
included a profile of a Mexican-American Florence family that moved
to Northern Kentucky eight years ago from Los Angeles:

A decrease of 1.3 percentage points in Hamilton County’s
black population under 5 was countered by increases in the black
population under 5 in each of the region’s six other core counties:
Butler, Clermont and Warren in Ohio and Boone, Campbell and Kenton in
Kentucky.

Overall, the regional population of Hispanic children under 5
years rose from 7,583 in 2010 to 8,032 in 2011, a proportional
increase of 0.4 percentage points to 6.1 percent.

The family of a teenager fatally shot
by a Cincinnati police officer on Fountain Square last summer has
filed a federal lawsuit alleging police used excessive force and
violated 16-year-old Davon Mullins' constitutional rights. Police
say Mullins pulled a handgun, but the lawsuit says he had been
disarmed before officer Oscar Cyranek shot him multiple times.

Former Senator John Edwards will learn
his fate today, as a jury was set to deliberate this morning on charges that Edwards used campaign funds to
conceal an affair during his run for president.

More than 200 pages of documents,
photos and audio recordings were released yesterday
offering further details about what happened the night George
Zimmerman shot and killed Trayvon Martin.

The documents include an FBI audio
analysis of the 911 call placed by a resident that captured yells and
screams. Two FBI examiners said they could not determine whether it
was Martin or Zimmerman yelling because of the poor quality of the
recording and the "extreme emotional state" of screamer.

Cell phone maker Nokia has accused
Apple of programming bias into its interactive Siri voice search by
making it answer the question “What is the best smartphone ever?”
by stating “"Wait... there are other phones?" The answer
had apparently previously been “Nokia's Lumia 900.” Apple won't
say whether or not it changed Siri's answer after finding the glitch.

A new study suggests that nighttime
fasting can go a long way toward keeping you slim even if you eat bad
stuff during the day.

If you're one of those people who enjoys relaxing in a public park, maybe eating a sandwich and enjoying the lush greenspace Cincinnati has grown proud of, that's all well and good. (Bring a blanket and some apples; enjoy yourself.) That is, until you get a little sleepy and want to lie down on the ground or a bench — that's illegal now.

The Cincinnati Park Board yesterday approved a no-lying down rule across all of its 5,000 acres of park land, likely in response to ongoing Occupy Cincinnati lawsuits over the legality of closing the park at night. People who lie down in parks are now subject to $150 fines for the misdemeanor offense.

Leave it to The Enquirer to publish a story analyzing local school district spending vs. academic success only to ignore the existence of private schools while drawing the conclusion that “a district that spends more doesn't necessarily produce higher test scores and graduation rates.” The story, titled “Big-spending districts net mixed academic grades,” doesn't include the qualifier “public school” or the possibility that local private schools spend even more per pupil than Indian Hill, Sycamore Township, Mariemont and Norwood, each of which spent $11,958 to $15,209 per student last year and earned Excellent or better ratings.

Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel has already
had a rough week, having to give back more than $100,000 in campaign
contributions in response to an FBI investigation. Today The
Cleveland Plain Dealer's Politifact website looked into
one of the five claims made in Mandel's new 30-second TV ad, and it
seems to be pretty false. Mandel claims that his opponent, Democratic
Sen. Sherrod Brown, “cast the deciding vote on the government
takeover of health care." Politifact notes that since the
health care overhaul passed by the minimum 60 votes necessary, that
every vote was technically “deciding.” But, on the other hand,
Brown was an early supporter of the legislation, and it is widely
known that Ben Nelson of Nebraska was the final “yes” vote to
join. Plus, technically, Brown was the seventh person to vote because
it was taken in alphabetical order.

Ohio public schools have received a
waiver for parts of No Child Left Behind that will remove a
requirement to get all of their students proficient in math and
reading by 2014. Nineteen states have received the waiver, meaning
they'll have to create their own federally approved academic progress
standards.

Covington leaders are expecting staff
reductions as part of balancing the 2012-13 budget to cover $1.5
million that was left out. The city is facing $1.6 million in cuts to
public-safety services and about $700,000 across other departments.

Mitt Romney officially won the
Republican presidential nomination yesterday, but no one's talking
about it because all the stories involve Donald Trump and the fact
that his iPhone app misspelled “America.”

While anti-urban Cincinnatians gripe over the
twice-approved $95 million streetcar project — some going so far as to
attach anti-funding amendments to federal bills that will never be
included in the final legislation — authorities on the other side of the
river are demonstrating just how little $20 million on transportation
funding can provide. The state will widen KY 237 in Boone County using
elevated ramps to allow for left-hand turns, adding a freeway-style
element to the residential/corridor area. The two-year project will be
paid for using Federal Surface Transportation Program funds.

Starting this fall all students in Newport
Independent Schools will get free breakfast and lunch because the
district is participating in the Community Eligibility Option in
President Obama’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010.

For particle physicists, finding the Higgs boson is a key
to confirming the standard model of physics that explains what gives
mass to matter and, by extension, how the universe was formed. …

Rosen compared the results scientists are preparing to
announce Wednesday to finding the fossilized imprint of a dinosaur: “You
see the footprints and the shadow of the object, but you don’t actually
see it.”

Spain won the 2012 European Championship soccer tournament on Sunday with a
4-0 victory over Italy. The Spanish team is being considered one of the
greatest ever, as it has won three straight major tournaments, including
the 2010 World Cup and 2008 Euro.

Mitt Romney will visit the Cincinnati
area this week: tonight at a private fundraiser at the Hilton
Netherland Plaza, Thursday at a Carthage manufacturing comany and
this weekend to hang with Rep. John Boehner up north and probably
with Sen. Rob Portman at some point. President Obama plans to be
around soon, too.

Economists say Romney's job creation
claims need more specifics before they'll be believable. On the other
hand, Obama's American Recovery
and Reinvestment Act has saved or created 1.4 million to 3.3 million
jobs, according to the Congressional Budget Office, and the American
Jobs Act would create 1.9 million, according to Moody's. From NPR:

+11.5 million — that's how many jobs
Romney claimed
last September he would create in the first term of his
administration. But true to form, Romney never said how he would
create that many jobs, nor has any reputable economist backed up his
claim. "Nowhere in the 160 page plan could I find a stated job
creation number," wrote Rebecca Thiess of EPI. "The math
doesn't just appear to be fuzzy — it appears to be nonexistent."
Added David Madland of the Center for American Progress: "It is a plan from the Republican
candidate for president designed to maximize corporate profits. What
it doesn't do is help the middle class or create jobs." Even the
conservative editorial page of theWall Street Journal called Romney's 59-point economic
tome "surprisingly timid and tactical considering our economic
predicament."

Democrat Ron Barber won the
congressional seat left by Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, who survived an
assassination attempt and resigned to focus on her recovery. The win
gives Democrats hope for taking control of the House in November.

What makes the referendum in California different is that, for the
first time, voters and not politicians will be the ones to decide.
And this has the food industry worried. Understandably so, since only
one in four Americans is convinced that GMOs are "basically safe", according to a survey conducted by the Mellman Group, and a big majority wants
food containing GMOs to be labeled.

This is one of the few issues in America today that enjoys broad
bipartisan support: 89% of Republicans and 90% of Democrats want
genetically altered foods to be labeled, as they already are in 40
nations in Europe, in Brazil, and even in China. In 2007, then
candidate Obama latched onto this popular issue saying that he would
push for labeling – a promise the president has yet to keep.

Construction to renovate the former IGA in Clifton's Gaslight district will come to a halt soon, and the future for the building remains uncertain; contractors told the Enquirer they'd finish working on the roof and then pull off the project. Steve Goessling, who purchased the property when it was vacated two years ago, says he plans on continuing to build out the building, but he doesn't have the $4.1 million he needs to make it happen. He recently hired Cassidy Turley to market the property to higher-end grocery chains.

The attorney general for the state of Missouri, Chris Koster, is talking about bringing back the use of gas chambers on death row inmates because he's worried about the state running out of lethal injection drugs.

Cincinnati had an entire month's worth of rainfall over the past week — 3.75 inches as of Sunday. The norm for July is 3.76 inches.

A near-record algae bloom is ensconcing the popular beaches of a coastal Chinese city with thick, bright green “sea lettuce,” as the locals call it. It’s not harmful to humans, but it does suffocate the marine life and kind of scares away tourists.

Two men with HIV now appear to now be virus-free after they received stem-cell transplants to treat their lymphoma.

Researchers at the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute combed through 18,000 hours of deep-sea video footage and found the ocean seafloor around Monterey Bay is covered in trash.

Ohio Treasurer Josh Mandel has returned
more than $100,000 in campaign contributions in response to an FBI
investigation into 21 donors who had no record of giving to federal
campaigns and many appearing to have low incomes. Mandel, a
Republican, is running against incombent Democrat Sen. Sherrod Brown.
Mandel's campaign treasurer Kathryn Kessler sent a letter to donors
explaining that any contributions appearing to be under investigation
would be refunded.

From The Toledo Blade:

Although the campaign provided a copy of the letter to The
Blade, it would not explain the timing of the decision or how long it
has been aware of the federal probe.

The Blade revealed the unusual pattern of contributions in
August.

The company's owner, Benjamin Suarez, and 16 of his employees
(plus some of their spouses) gave about $200,000 to Mr. Mandel and
U.S. Rep. Jim Renacci (R., Wadsworth) last year. Each of those donors
gave $5,000, the maximum allowable amount, to one or both candidates.

The Ohio Senate yesterday passed new
fracking regulations, and the final version caused some environmental
organizations to change their stance on the bill. The Ohio
Environmental Council and the Sierra Club had both been neutral on
the legislation until changes were made forcing anyone suing over
chemical trade secrets to show current or potential harm, according
to The Enquirer. The regulations are part of Kasich's new energy bill
and easily passed both the Senate and House and is expected to be
signed by Kasich soon.

Cincinnati Public Schools says it will
apply for the latest available federal education grants, which amount
to nearly $700 million. The grants are geared toward helping schools
proceed with reform and innovation.

United Nations inspectors have
reportedly found uranium in Iran enriched beyond the highest levels
previously reported. One diplomat said the measure could actually be
a measurement error, though the reading could also mean that Iran is
closer to producing bomb-grade uranium than previously thought.

Scientists might be one step closer to
creating birth control for men after U.K. scientists found a gene
used to enable sperm to mature.